CAUSA (Collective for the Advancement of Unified Studies in the Visual Arts) has functioned, since 2003, with the aim of opening channels of communication concerning aspects of cultural memory in relation to independent curatorial research. CAUSA strives to develop autonomous scholarly analysis and interpretation of visual culture (including problems of intelligibility) within specific historical contexts. Recent curatorial initiatives have been realized by CAUSA in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (University of British Columbia), Walter Phillips Art Gallery (The Banff Centre), Presentation House Gallery (North Vancouver), and the West Vancouver Museum. CAUSA is David Bellman & Meirion Cynog Evans.

IN ONE SENSE, ART OR ‘IDEAS’ DO ‘REFLECT’ A SITUATION SINCE THEY ARE A WAY OF DEALING WITH A SITUATION.
—Kenneth Burke

An exhibition entitled 955,000 (a figure corresponding to the then-current population of Greater Vancouver) opened at the Vancouver Art Gallery in January 1970. That project is now globally recognized as a pioneering institutional initiative. The works assembled in the exhibition had revealed, according to the VAG, “new attitudes to art on the part of the artists,” and the exhibition succeeded on its own terms through the display and documentation of conceptual prospects. These prospects were being developed by groundbreaking experiments in North America and Europe from the potentialities of text, context, proposition, and place. On the CBC Radio programme Critics on Air (January 17, 1970), Richard Simmins spoke in support of 955,000, observing: “The total experience, which constantly expands every time anyone thinks or talks or reacts to the show positively or negatively, represents a challenge to established values.”

By extension from these remarks, the exhibition Finite + Infinite proposes precise engagements with certain key works—located across an expanded field of experimental visual culture—that emerged from a new generation of critical inquiry circa 1970. This project focuses attention on extensive and regenerative legacies that, through contemporary curatorial practice, continue to develop the endlessly renewable possibilities of public address.

A CAUSA research project concerning the purposeful use of revived curatorial resources—as contained within local art reference library and archive holdings at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the University of British Columbia, Emily Carr University, and the Vancouver Public Library—is scheduled to coincide with the opening of Finite + Infinite.

Curated by CAUSA (David Bellman and Meirion Cynog Evans)

Part 1

DAN GRAHAM
September 10–October 1

Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay, 1974

mirror and closed circuit video and time delay, video camera, and monitor

Artspeak gratefully acknowledges the support of the Vancouver Foundation, The Canada Council, the Province of BC through the BC Arts Council, the City of Vancouver, our volunteers and our members. Panel discussion presented in partnership with the Audain Gallery and Vancity Office of Community Engagement at Simon Fraser University.

The exhibition traces new attitudes to art on the part of artists whose work attained pre-eminence (globally) in the period 1965-1975.

Our programme foregrounds collectively complex (epoch-making) conceptual/environmental perspectives from standpoints of individual artists. These regenerative potentialities develop by way of profound procedures of critical inquiry that inform a single generation’s projection of itself as a continuous challenge to established values.

Our project concerns the purposeful use of revived curatorial resources—as contained within local art reference library and archive holdings.